One morning, frost sparkling in the trees, his sister and mother load the donkey with jars of honey, wrap themselves in cloaks, and head upriver. As soon as they round the bend, the boy calls Anna into the byre. He wraps pieces of honeycomb in a cheesecloth and sets it to boil. When the wax is rendered, he lifts out the cakes and mashes them into a paste. Then he unrolls a piece of oxhide across the crude table, and together they work the still-warm beeswax into the leather. When all the wax has been worked in, he rolls the hide and tucks it under his arm and beckons her up a faint trail at the head of the ravine to the old half-hollow yew on the bluff.

In daylight, the tree is magnificent: its trunk swirls with ten thousand intertwined gnarls; dozens of low branches, decked with bright red berries, eddy toward the ground like snakes. The boy clambers up through the limbs, squeezes himself into the hollow part of the trunk, and emerges holding Himerius’s sack.

Together they examine the silk hood and snuffbox and book to make sure they’re still dry. Then he unrolls the newly waxed oxhide across the ground, wraps the box and book with the silk inside the hide, and ties the whole thing shut. He stows it back inside the tree, and Anna understands that this will be their secret, that the manuscript, like the boy’s face, will be feared and mistrusted, and she remembers the flaring pits of Kalaphates’s eyes, his rage and exultation as he held Maria’s unconscious face to the hearth and burned Licinius’s quires to ash.

She learns the words for home, cold, pine, kettle, bowl, and hand. Mole, mouse, otter, horse, hare, hunger. By the time for spring planting, she is grasping nuance. To brag is to “pretend to be two and a half.” To get into trouble is to “wade into the onions.” The boy has multiple expressions for the various feelings one experiences in the rain: most convey wretchedness, but several do not. One is the same sound as joy.

In early spring she is hauling water up from the creek when she passes him and he pats the stone on which he sits. She sets down the pole and its two pots and sits beside him. “Sometimes,” he says, “when I feel like working, I just sit and wait for the feeling to pass,” and his eyes catch Anna’s and she realizes that she understands the joke, and they laugh.